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I remember being pretty excited by the prospect of a service like Hulu. The idea that major networks were actually coming together to stream mainstream video content was impressive. It was such a departure from the locked down, share nothing, mentality of old. I thought to myself, “Wow, does Hollywood finally get it?”. Apparently my optimism was exactly that…optimistic.

Sometime in the last week or so it was reported that Hulu, a video streaming service run by NBC and FOX, started “encrypting” Ajax responses to block unauthorized software clients (Boxee et al.) from sidestepping the hulu.com website to view content. However, encryption is purposefully in quotes, as what Hulu actually implemented is a client-side obfuscation mechanism. It it well known that such protection mechanisms are flawed by design and bound to be circumvented quickly.

The protective measure that is implemented rests on the obfuscation of Ajax responses made against hulu.com. Instead of returning plaintext HTML content, Ajax requests return obfuscated URL encoded strings. These URL encoded strings are reverted to plaintext on the client-side using JavaScript. For example, a request to:

The entire string is approximately 141KB long. Other than the “dobfu__” prefix, the remainder of the string is URL encoded. This obfuscated string is transformed into plaintext by a JavaScript function called “_dobfu()”. This function, after a bit of reformatting, is reproduced below:

All of the above code is pretty easy to follow, save for the references to $A() and the the tol() functions. The $A() function is a Prototype global function that creates a full array object from any other object that can pass for an array (supports indexing, etc). This is done so that the new object inherits the full functionality of an array (the map method is needed in this case). The second piece of ambiguous logic , the tol() method, is defined in another JavaScript file and is reproduced below:

Essentially this method takes a string of bytes and creates an array of 32-bit integers from each 4-byte chunk. For example, if the string processed in the method was “\x01\x23\x45\x67\x89\xab\xcd\xef” the method would return the array [0x67452301, 0xefcdab89]. The ordering of the individual bytes is a result of the “tol()” method parsing the data as little-endian.

So, with those two functions defined we can quickly describe how Hulu de-obfuscates responses. The obfuscated string is broken up into 4-byte integers. Since the length of the obfuscated string is always evenly divisible by four we are guaranteed that a string of length x will turn into an array of 4-byte integers of length x/4. Then, for each 4-byte integer, the value is XORed with the constant “0xfeedface”. Once XORed, the individual bytes from the integer are split apart and converted back to their equivalent ASCII value. Finally, all trailing NULL bytes are removed from the de-obfuscated string.

It is a bit difficult to imagine what Hulu thought they might accomplish with the above scheme. It effectively does nothing to prevent third-party tools from performing the same obfuscation/de-obfuscation. Any scheme that attempts to implement client-side “decryption”, particularly in JavaScript, is bound for failure. The client possesses the obfuscated message, the key to de-obfuscate the message, and the Javascript that executes the algorithm. Using these components, it is a trivial exercise to transform any obfuscated response back into plaintext. Hulu likely thwarted unauthorized software for the better part of an afternoon and no more. Client-side security mechanisms simply don’t work. Even complex systems implemented in native code, such as popular DRM schemes, that may go unbroken for a period of time, will eventually be circumvented. However, to implement a similar preventative measure in JavaScript lowers the difficulty of circumvention dramatically.

Beyond the technical discussion there is also a more broad question to be asked. What was the net gain for Hulu? They failed to accomplish their implicit goal: to block unauthorized software. Hulu simply received another bit of bad press for treating their customers like thieves. Hulu, and other such services, need to realize that the ubiquitous availability of their content will ultimately grow their fan base. There is ever increasing competition for a viewer’s eyes and ears. Podcasts, YouTube, gaming, etc are all competing. Third-party products, such as Boxee, only serve to increase the ubiquity of their content, which shouldn’t be viewed as a bad thing. Thwarting their own customers only sours the experience and reinforces the presumption that a good chunk of the entertainment industry just doesn’t get it. Besides being bad security, this latest debacle is just bad business.